Wait a sec, are you referring to Matt’s post? I think that’s a famous joke and/or urban legend, and he just inserted Chomsky’s name to be funny.
If I’m completely missing the point and there’s something in the article about this that I missed, or if Chomsky does indeed discuss this issue somewhere, then I’m sorry.
Anyway, two negatives do make a positive in my dialect. If that phenomenon doesn’t exist in your dialect, then that’s quite interesting. But surely Chomsky is nothing if not a descriptivist (like any linguist who makes a scientific study of language), so of course he would accept the existence of dialects like mine as well as dialects like yours. There’s no “right” or “wrong” one to have as your native dialect. “Double negative = positive” dialects are real varieties of English, which have real speakers; they’re not just a construct invented by elitist snobs.
Compare this with the “rule” against ending a sentence with a preposition: as far as I know, nobody actually speaks like this, and it was basically invented by prescriptivist “grammarians” who didn’t get the memo that English and Latin were different languages with different syntax.
Having a standard written language that can be used by speakers of multiple dialects is another issue altogether.
